Three decades ago, The Heritage Foundation produced a primer on the Reagan Revolution entitled Mandate for Leadership, which offered an overarching philosophy against government and in favor of unregulated markets. Now, with President Barack Obama in office, we face a promising moment in history to present a different ideological perspective for our nation’s future.

Join Demos, The Nation, and the Institute for Policy Studies for a forum featuring prominent experts and scholars in the progressive community. The speakers will draw on essays from a new book, Mandate for Change: Policies and Leadership for 2009 and Beyond, a collaboration of over 70 authors and activists that offers a set of specific policy proposals for the new national administration on critical domestic and international issues. The ideas, policies, and resources presented in this volume set forth a fundamental, badly needed “mandate for change” to reinvigorate government and rethink the role of markets and civil society.

Speakers:

Chester Hartman is Director of Research at the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, DC and the founder and former Chair of the Planners Network, a national organization of progressive urban and rural planners and community organizers. Throughout his career as an urban planner and scholar, he has served on many boards, including the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban Affairs, Housing Policy Debate, Urban Affairs Quarterly, Housing Studies, and The Journal of Negro Education. He is also a former Board Member of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, and was the founder and former President of PRRAC, as well as a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam.

Katrina vanden Heuvel has been editor of The Nation since 1995 and publisher since 2005. She is the co-editor of Taking Back America--And Taking Down The Radical Right and most recently, editor of The Dictionary of Republicanisms. She has received awards for public service from numerous groups, including The Liberty Hill Foundation, The Correctional Association, The Association for American-Russian Women, and the New York Civil Liberties Union's Callaway Prize for the Defense of the Right of Privacy. She is also the recipient of The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's 2003 "Voices of Peace" Award. Vanden Heuvel is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the board of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, the Institute for Policy Studies, the World Policy Institute, the Correctional Association of New York, and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.

Miles Rapoport is the President of Demos, where he sets the agenda and oversees the management of the organization and its fundraising efforts. Prior to assuming the helm at Demos, he served for ten years in the Connecticut legislature, where he was a leading expert on electoral reform and served as Chair of the Committee on Elections. In 1994, he was elected as Secretary of the State of Connecticut, during which time he released two unique reports on the state of democracy in Connecticut. His articles have appeared in national magazines and newspapers, and he is the founder of Northeast Action, a leading political reform organization in New England. Rapoport came to Demos from a position as Executive Director of DemocracyWorks, a Hartford-based group that works on democracy reform.

To register for this event, contact Jinny Khanduja at 212-389-1399 or jkhanduja@demos.org or click here.